Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Jazz Most Elusive

Eric Lloyd's "Jazz Most Elusive" reminds us of how linked jazz and performance are. Some of our poems are, of course, inspired by LPs, CDs, and even YouTube videos, but the heart of jazz is live performance. As Eric indicated when he submitted this poem, it was inspired by "a combination of experiences that I've had with live, contemporary music in an urban setting."

Jazz Most Elusive

Eager menagerians

Haphazardly located

Around a nondescript stage

Aglow with amber, smokey

Crepuscular purple light

Focused on four sharp figures

S-curved as music made them.

With ritualistic grace

Betraying deep devotion,

A motion mantric... tantric,

They obsessively coddled

Worn, weathered, leather cases

Unlatching, unravelling,

Adorning, purging, tuning,

Extending and arranging,

Well-crafted and well-polished,

Wood and metal masterworks

Of timber, texture and tone.

Time blurred, snapped, locked to locus.

The four of them assembled.

Dialectic imminent,

The air buzzed, hummed and convulsed.

The drummer sat at his set

Then checked the ergonomics --

Fixed the snare and the hi-hat,

Nodded to the bass player

Who gave a smile in return.

The bartender dimmed the lights.

The crowd juxtapositioned.

Without further commotion,

The cool coeval quartet

Expertly coaxed their lovers

Caressing warm expressions,

Quixotic emotations,

Wanton wending white spirals,

Fractalized black progressions,

A long writhing aggregate,

An evolving creation,

Twisting around the root note,

A dirty mind altering

Melee of dark seduction

Cascading the cortexes

Of the entranced listeners

Switching them on to active

Socratic participants --

Minds seduced and bedazzled,

Attuned to arcane chantings

Of prolific enchantments

Flowing from, to, dancing round,

Harmoniously converging

Then diverging

From the epicenter

Of that most precious

Elusive, sought after

Long lost,

Forgotten,

OriginalJazz.

Eric discovered at a young age that in order to write, one must live, and life is to embrace liberty in pursuit of ever fleeting happiness. His opinion is that the writer through life must fill his or her soul with a collection of sensory experiences from which to draw through his or her command of language to convey his or her soul in relation to those experiences to ultimately connect with his or her audience. To Eric, poems should represent a snapshot or snapshots in time of the long body of the poet in relation to his or her experiential travels. Here is a link to Eric reciting the poem below:

To accompany Eric's poem, I am also posting links to The Fantastic Merlins, Jack DeJohnette, Sound on Survival, and Charlie Byrd's music. (Eric had mentioned each of these artists in our correspondence.)

Here the Fantastic Merlins perform at the Black Dog Cafe in St. Paul, MN: